The War: The Hawaii Conference

The decision, activist and abrupt, was in
the quintessential Johnson style. With no advance warning, the
President announced that he would fly to Hawaii for three days of talks
with U.S. military commanders and leaders of South Viet Nam's
government. The South Vietnamese did not even have time to draft
position papers. Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, asked when he first heard about
it, confessed in some embarrassment: "Very recently."

Nevertheless, the imposing array of officialdom at the Honolulu talks
signaled that the President intended to conduct a wide-ranging
examination of the military, political and psychological conduct of the
Viet Nam warindeed,...